European negotiators have struck three deals on travel reservation data with the United States, and each negotiation has turned out worse for Europe than the last. So now the European Commission has proposed a fourth negotiation. Its opening position for the fourth set of talks is even less realistic than its proposals for the first three.
My personal favorite is the insistence that the US amend the Privacy Act to cover foreigners. There is little or no evidence that Americans can sue European police agencies for their handling of, say, the information they harvest whenever we check into a European hotel. Yet somehow the right to sue over data protection becomes a matter of fierce European moral urgency when it can be used to bash the United States.